WRACK AND SALVAGE

10 February - 26 March 2023, Pivot Gallery, Belconnen Arts Centre, Emu Bank, Belconnen ACT.

Seabirds

            fish

                        oil rigs

            diving bells

                                    fishing fleets

                                                            whales

                                                oceans

                                                            continents

                                                disappear between the teeth of my shredder.

Wrack and Salvage provokes questions in the face of the climate crisis. What do we value? What do we stand to lose? What will we see destroyed? What are we willing to sacrifice? What are we prepared to save?

This sculptural installation resembles the flying forms of flood debris. There are fifty – one for each year of my life. They are made from books and other documents that were in my possession when I started making this work, during the ACT’s second COVID shutdown in 2021. A non-renewable resource of sorts.

The wrench of loss I felt as I fed pages into the shredder caused me to reflect on my relationship to each book or paper. These stories, alongside notes on the state of climate science and policy at the date of each publication, trace an idiosyncratic and personal story of the emergence of the climate crisis before and through my lifetime. As I turned 50 in 2021, I was confronted by how inadequately we have responded to climate change, which has been in the public consciousness for all of my adult life. Reminding myself of just how much we have known, and for how long, was devastating. Yet hope and resolution became apparent, in what I chose to sacrifice and what I chose to save.

Postcard petition

On 25 March 2023, people dropped in to Wrack and Salvage to contribute to a ‘postcard petition’, making collage postcards that combined text and image to express their conns and feelings about the threat of climate change and their wish to see more action to protect the environment. Here are some images from the workshop.

For a gallery of the postcards the participants made on the day, see the Postcard Petition page.